Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Last weekend, I had a wonderful opportunity - weather provided - to capture some great scenes. It could not have gone better, in my opinion.

My wife and kiddo and I were checking out a record store in West Seattle, and when we were leaving, I noticed the oncoming sunset blazing across the sky. I opened up Google Maps and found a nearby park on the beach, Loman Beach Park. We B-Lined for it, endured the cold, and spent a good hour or two there.

I really tried to apply some things I have learned recently about composition, camera settings, and HDR in general. I would like to think that I did a pretty good job with this shoot, especially for it being but my second time. I got 15 photos from this shoot that I simply could not leave out, from a total of 30-something bracketed photos. This is pretty good compared to my first outing, with 7 photos being left in out of 126.

Of the fifteen that I kept, here are a couple of my favourites:

This is probably my best photo yet, and it was almost completely by incident.

The silhouetted boy in this photo walked in just as I released the shutter and was still moving right up until the two-second timer went off. He managed to stay completely motionless throughout the three bracketed images.

I am quite pleased with the way this turned out.

Here, I was able to create a sort of battle between darks, lights, and the nothing that is the lack of colour. While the human eye tends to focus on the brightest point in a photo, I feel as though I have created three defined focal points here, without taking away from the photo. What do you think?

Monday, December 10, 2012

Probably one of the most-used vantage points in all of photography is that of Kerry Park in the Queen Anne neighbourhood of Seattle, WA. This is precisely why I chose it as my testing ground for my first serious photo sesh.

We spent all day in Seattle, making a family outing of it. We visited Black Coffee Co-op for the first time, and I must say - if you care about what you put into your body, and about the people preparing your food, please give them a look.

This session was definitely a great first one. While I did not get to stay past five o'clock, I have already learned a few valuable things:

1) Gloves are a must.

2) A shutter release cable may be a good thing to get, or utilizing the camera's timer is something I should do. After going into Lightroom, I realized that there was shake in a lot of my photos despite using a tripod.

3) A polarizing filter is probably a good idea as well.

4) Too much contrast in post-production = too much noise.

5) Just because you have your camera pointed in a certain direction, does not mean that another photographer won't step right in front of it.

I used Photomatix Pro to combine the bracketed images and to apply the major adjustments. Then I opened them in Photoshop to do away with any residual noise or litter on the lens (shown as spots in photos), and crop and finalise the images.

Here are some good pulls from my first major photo sesh:

I am not extremely happy with all of them, but for my first outing with my camera, and for my first time doing HDR, I don't think it went all that bad. And, heck!, I learned a few things along the way.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Food is a naturally common topic in our household. My wife is such an amazing cook that it is hard not to try to capture in photos what she does in meals and goodies. You will most likely see a lot of images of food and the like. My apologies aforehand for any caused keyboard damage from drool.

Welcome to the Official Blog of Photography by David L. Clark. You will be able to find here all my works, recent happenings in my photography adventure, and maybe a few random tid-bits every now and again.